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On the cusp of an almighty row over President Donald Trump’s planned mass deportations, let’s look to Europe for light relief.
Last month, the pridefully left-wing management of the storied nineteenth century Parisian theater Gaité Lyrique, owned by the pridefully left-wing Paris council and traditionally the home of operettas, digital arts and musical performances, staged a free conference on “reinventing the refugee welcome in France.” The organizers literally invited their own downfall: 200 West African migrants who apparently felt very welcome indeed and refused to leave.
Gaité Lyrique invited its own downfall: 200 West African migrants who refused to leave
These passionate opera fans have since swelled to 350. The pridefully left-wing management cannot, of course, bring themselves to eject their newly permanent audience, who we presume are hoping to subscribe for a full season. Meanwhile, activists have seized on the “anti-racist, anti-colonial” cause célèbre, shuttling boxes of fruit and vegetables into the venue, though no theater is set up to function as a soup kitchen. The building’s zero showers and lone pair of toilets dizzy the imagination. When the story was reported, British comments exploded with bitter hilarity: “For goodness sake. The theater is far too small. Bus them all to Versailles and they can invite their friends.”
Although another commenter noted that for Gaité Lyrique this is probably “the best show they’ve put on in years,” the spectacle isn’t, alas, proving profitable. All other events have been canceled. Gaité Lyrique depends on ticket sales and cannot afford to sponsor a ceaseless piece of improvisational performance art that’s free to the public. The pridefully left-wing theater is not only suffering physical degradation I’m reluctant to picture too vividly, but is struggling to pay sixty-some employees. It’s going bankrupt.
Obviously, this fiasco is a metaphor for European immigration more generally. Either by inviting bums on seats or being lax about checking tickets at the door, our pridefully left-wing governments and civil servants have allowed in a rabble of poorly educated visitors from the “developing world” — at a certain point, you have to ask, developing into what? — who aren’t leaving. The presence of these sizable contingents amounts to blackmail. The migrants sleeping on tables in Gaité Lyrique are holding out for free accommodation, which, until it’s on offer, they will simply seize. In kind, because people take up physical, economic and political space, illegal immigration is an annexation of someone else’s territory.
If seemingly presumptuous, the occupiers in Paris illustrate an emotional progression altogether human and therefore predictable. Humble supplicants at sea in a strange land don’t remain supplicants for long. Beseeching accelerates to demand. Whatever you give people, they soon take for granted and believe they deserve. Benefits thus become entitlements and entitlements are always insufficient. Foreigners from hard-scrabble countries rapidly adapt to a culture in which it’s reasonable to expect a warm, safe place to live, a full fridge and a car. Inexorably, then, the initial gratitude of destitute immigrants can slide to resentment.
Besides, gormless, vainglorious progressive altruism is an open invitation to being taken advantage of. The folks staging their “refugee welcome” would have anticipated gushing thanks from their West African beneficiaries for generously “inclusive” speeches from the likes of the Red Cross. But these Africans didn’t want speeches. They wanted housing. Want your theater back? Gimme an apartment.
Desperation being a keen pedagogical motivator, most migrants are quick studies. They learn our immigration loopholes — such as the obligation of the French state to provide free digs to migrants who are unaccompanied minors. Accordingly, the theater’s occupiers chant from its steps: “Shame on this power who declares war on unaccompanied minors!” Although both French authorities and local observers estimate that nearly all these men are at least in their twenties, everyone quoted in the press claims to be sixteen. If migrants take us for mugs, that’s because we are mugs.
Canny migrants also learn to use a host country’s own propaganda and political vanities as weapons. Gaité Lyrique’s occupiers shout through megaphones “We’re all equal, not illegal!” and “We want liberty, equality, fraternity!” In the UK, migrants latch on to lingo about free speech and human rights. America’s preening about being a “nation of immigrants” can easily be deployed to argue that it’s hypocritical to keep anyone out. Throughout the West, officialdom’s sensitivity to discrimination against sexual minorities and sympathy for the perils faced by any Muslim who converts to Christianity leave immigration judges open to being suckered.
Lastly, do-gooders always expect other people to pay the price of their goodness. That may be what makes this story so rich. With considerable success in both the US and UK, droves of righteous charity workers are helping foreigners enter illegally and avoid deportation. In other words, progressives are continually giving our countries away, when our countries aren’t theirs to give. At least in Paris the do-gooders themselves are sacrificing for their largesse on our behalf. The money the theater is losing should pay its lofty staff’s salaries. For once the open-borders crowd has incited trespassing that encroaches on their own space, and arty immigration advocates have invited freeloading that costs them personally. Far more commonly, publicly financed NGOs that champion migration dump the costs of newcomers’ hotels and shelters, healthcare and education on the host nation’s taxpayers.
The occupation in Paris is loud and raucous. Dope hazes the block, fights often break out and the park across the street has long since been abandoned by local French families. Thus nearby eateries are suffering from a precipitous loss of custom, which the restaurateurs do not deserve. Nevertheless, it’s satisfying to see immigration worthies hoisted on the petard of their own gullibility. British newspaper readers would find this story even more satisfying were they not justifiably convinced that the abundance of the theater’s occupiers will in short order rock up on the coast of Kent — at which point the home office will clasp these “vulnerable,” unparented wayfarers to the bosom of the United Kingdom. After all, they’re only sixteen.
